Whatever you think about the widening divide between Democrats and Republicans, ideological differences do not explain why politicians from the same parties, who share the same goals and policy preferences, often argue fiercely about how best to attain them. This perplexing misalignment suggests that we are missing an important piece of the puzzle. Political scientists have increasingly drawn on the relationship between voters’ personalities and political orientation, but there has been little empirically grounded research looking at how legislators’ personalities influence their performance on Capitol Hill.WithMore than a Feeling, my coauthors (Adam J. Rameyand Jonathan D. Klingler) and I have developed an innovative framework incorporating what are known as the Big Five dimensions of personality—openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—to improve our understanding of political behavior among members of Congress. To determine how strongly individuals display these traits, we identified correlates across a wealth of data, including speeches, campaign contributions and expenditures, committee involvement, willingness to filibuster, and even Twitter feeds. We then show how we might expect to see the influence of these traits across all aspects of Congress members’ political behavior—from the type and quantity of legislation they sponsor and their style of communication to whether they decide to run again or seek a higher office. We also argue convincingly that the types of personalities that have come to dominate Capitol Hill in recent years may be contributing to a lot of the gridlock and frustration plaguing the American political system.

Journal Articles

While the importance of political appointments is a matter of popular and scholarly consensus, theorists and empiricists have tended to focus on different considerations, such as ideology and confirmation duration respectively. More recently, there have been efforts to integrate empirical and theoretical scholarship but, to date, no empirical analysis assesses theoretical expectations about the relationship between temporal concerns and nominee ideologies. We fill this gap by examining theoretical predictions and related expectations about the role of time, especially how its passage affects the President’s ideological choices of nominees. Contrary to expectations, we find executives are disadvantaged as days pass—whether time is measured by the period since vacancy onset or after a Congress begins—and Presidents propose nominees with whom they are less ideologically compatible over time. Our analysis indicates theorists may need to adjust their models, such as by assuming Presidents discount the future more steeply than Senators.

"The Effects of Polarization on Ideological Certainty: An Application to Executive Order Issuance." Accepted. American Politics Research. (With Mark D. Brockway)Many standard models of political institutions frame outcomes as a function of the preferences of key decision-makers. However, these models, and the empirical analyses they inspire, typically assume that decision-makers can infer the identities and ideological locations of decision-makers without error. Here, we reveal the substantive importance of this assumption. We show that partisan sorting, a common cause of polarization, can result in reduced uncertainty about the ideologies of key decision-makers and the identities of key pivots. When we incorporate estimates of uncertainty into empirical models of executive order issuance, we find lower levels of uncertainty are associated with higher rates of policy-relevant executive order issuance. These results have implications for the study of polarization and the use of models of institutions in political science.

Due to the large amounts of text generated by government agencies and policymakers, computer-assisted text-as-data methods are starting to become more popular for scholars of public administration, public policy, and political science, as they allow for much faster processing of large amounts of textual data. Here, I review several of the more common text-as-data methods and provide an overview of their applicability to different data structures and substantive questions in public administration. Then, using thousands of documents issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and its predecessor agency—the Health Care Financing Administration—I showcase the utility of topic models by illustrating how they can be used in conjunction with other politically-relevant covariates to help explain changes in agency priorities. I then conclude by discussing other possible uses for computational text analysis methods in public administration.

Recent work in the study of legislative politics has applied the Five Factor Model of personality traits to investigate myriad phenomena in the United States Congress. This literature raises questions about the Big Five personality traits and political representation, specifically, whether voters are more likely to support legislators with similar personality traits to their own, or legislators with valence personality traits, regardless of congruence. Using data from the 2014 and 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, we predict voters' job approval of legislators using measures of personality congruence and personality valence. Our results support personality valence over personality congruence as a determinant of job approval.

We apply recent advances in machine learning to measure Congressmember personality traits using floor speeches from 1996-2014. We also demonstrate the superiority of text-based measurement over survey-based measurement by showing that personality traits are correlated with survey response rates for members of Congress. Finally, we provide one empirical application showcasing the importance of personality on Congressional behavior.

What Trump and Clinton’s personality traits tell us about how they might govern as president (LSE)

"Patronage Appointments and Agency Independence."2018. Journal of Politics 80(4): 1411-1416.​ - Preprint VersionWhen making appointments to bureaucratic positions, Presidents often have to balance various appointee traits, including loyalty, competence, connections, campaign experience, and potential electoral benefit. Previous research has suggested that patronage appointees--often characterized as those individuals appointed because of campaign experience, electoral benefit, or other non-policy political benefits--tend to be placed in low-priority agencies whose missions are ideological matches to the President and in positions where they will have minimal effects on agency outcomes. However, this research has overlooked the role of agency structure and the ease with which appointees can be placed into--or removed from--office. This article focuses on agency decision-maker independence, or the extent to which agency structure limits the appointment/removal of key agency decision makers. Using data on individuals appointed in the first six months of the Obama administration, I find that Presidents put fewer patronage appointees into agencies whose structural features promote agency decision-maker independence.​

Political scientists have long considered ideology, partisanship, and constituency in determining how members of the United States Congress make decisions. Meanwhile, psychologists have held that personality traits play central roles in decision-making. Here, we bridge these literatures by offering a framework for modeling how personality influences legislative behavior. Drawing from experimental economics and neuropsychology, we identify core cognitive constraints for the “Big Five” personality model, parameterizing them in ways useful for crafting formal models of legislative behavior. We then show one example of the applicability of this framework by creating a formal decision-theoretic model of constituency communication. We show that when there exists uncertainty over the true state of the world, personality traits have more influence on individual decisions.

Individuals who are more sensitive to punishment from error are more likely to provide nonresponses in surveys. We argue Neurotics’ sensitivity to punishment leads them to avoid gathering costly information and forming/reporting opinions about stimuli. Using data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we show Neuroticism is strongly and positively associated with NA/DK responses when placing politicians on a 7-point ideological scale. We then introduce to political science a Bayesian hierarchical model that allows nonresponse to be generated by both a lack of information as well as disincentives for response. Using this model, we show that the NA/DK responses in these data are likely due to inhibited information collection—as opposed to indecision from error avoidance—by Neurotics.

"The Who, When, and Where of Executive Nominations: Integrating Agency Independence and Appointee Ideology." 2018. American Journal of Political Science62(2): 296-311. (With Lawrence S. Rothenberg) - Preprint VersionIn recent years, scholars have expended considerable efforts to understand the executive appointment process and the forces influencing the choices made by the President and the Senate. However, some factors integral to theoretical models have not been well-integrated empirically, and other relevant factors have not been incorporated much at all. Here, we focus on one determinant corresponding to the former critique—nominee ideology—and another corresponding to the latter—the independence of decision-makers in the targeted agencies. We examine a series of theoretically-driven hypotheses regarding the effects of both ideology and independence on who gets nominated and if and when nominees are eventually confirmed. Results show nominee ideology and decision-maker independence matter a great deal and factor into Presidential strategic choices and Senatorial responses in ways according to expectations. Our findings have important ramifications for understanding appointments empirically and for future theoretical development.

"The Incompetence Trap: The (Conditional) Irrelevance of Agency Expertise." 2017. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 27(2): 217-235. - Preprint Version​Formal models of the appointments process typically cast the decision of the appointing executive as one where an open position is assumed and an appointee is chosen in order to maximize the utility of the executive (and perhaps that of the legislature if confirmation is required). However, several—often patronage-focused—processes within the appointments process focus instead on finding acceptable positions for “necessary-to-place” individuals. Here, I develop a model where the goal is to find the best position for such an individual. In contrast to many existing models of the appointments process, I find that when the personnel process is focused on finding the best position for a given person as opposed to finding the best person for a given position, “turkey farms”—agencies that have high numbers of minimally-competent (but necessary-to-place) individuals among their ranks—can result in equilibrium. Moreover, once agency capacity is sufficiently low, incompetent individual appointees no longer have detrimental effects on the utilities of the appointing principals, which further incentivizes the usage of certain agencies as “turkey farms.”

Previous studies of presidential appointments have consistently found that presidents place their most competent appointees into agencies responsible for policy issues high on their agendas. Using a survey with an embedded experimental manipulation, we examine whether members of the public, when given the backgrounds of fictional presidential appointees, are able to infer the president's policy priorities based on the perceived competence of the appointees. Results suggest that perceived policy importance is positively associated with perceptions of competence, and negatively associated with perceptions of favoritism or patronage--characterized here as the nomination of campaign fundraisers. Moreover, these same factors are associated with increased levels of support for the President's policy positions in the policy areas for which the nominees are responsible. Notably, perceived nominee ideology has no perceptible effect on policy support or perceived policy importance.

Scholars interested in bargaining over political appointments typically analyze the duration between the candidate’s nomination and eventual disposition, ignoring the prior period between vacancy and nomination. Using a dataset of vacancies reported to the Government Accountability Office, we instead examine the nomination stage. We uncover both commonalities and differences between the dynamics of nomination and those of confirmation. Ideological divergence between the President and the Senate filibuster pivot tends to delay nominations, but only under divided government. Presidents move more quickly on more important positions, but are also influenced by the ideological leanings of the agencies.

Despite their responsibility for federal policy implementation in the United States, little research has focused on how presidential nominees and appointees affect public opinion. This study offers the first systematic examination of this overlooked phenomenon. Using a survey with an embedded experimental manipulation, we find that perceived nominee competence is associated with increased trust in government in general, as well as individual nominees in particular, whereas perceptions of favoritism or patronage—characterized here as the nomination of campaign fundraisers—are associated with decreased levels of trust in the same. Notably, perceived nominee ideology has no perceptible effect on either trust in government or the nominees themselves.

Media accounts of presidential appointments have often characterized the ambassadorial appointments process as overtaken by patronage concerns, with the most attractive posts set aside for those responsible for the president's election, few of whom have diplomatic experience. Here, using original data on all ambassadors, envoys, and other chiefs of mission appointed during the 68th through 112th Congresses, I leverage the credentialing process of the Foreign Service to conduct an empirical test of the determinants of professional versus nonprofessional appointments. I find that Foreign Service appointments are more likely when there exists significant ideological distance between the appointing president and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when the difficulty of the posting is high, and when the attractiveness of the posting is low.

Pundits, politicians, and political scientists alike often bemoan the long delays in filling both executive and judicial vacancies. However, most political science scholarship has ignored why executives delay nomination, instead focusing on why legislatures delay confirmation. In this article, I develop a formal model that seeks to explain the causes and consequences of both types of delay. By incorporating the ﻿effects﻿ of time, nominee competence, and nonpolicy incentives, the model provides a number of important findings: (1) The passage of time exacerbates the executive's first-mover advantage and may result in less-competent nominees; (2) Confirmation delay results when the executive's costs of searching for new nominees are sufficiently high and/or the pool of potential candidates for nomination is sufficiently incompetent; and (3) Nomination delay results when the executive's internal vetting process indicates a candidate for nomination is sufficiently incompetent relative to the pool of potential nominees.

Much of the bureaucratic literature suggests that, when staffing the bureaucracy, executives want agents who are both responsive to their political needs and possess the competence needed to fulfill their directives. However, institutional barriers—such as the requirement for legislative confirmation—exist that may make pursuing a strategy of responsive competence difficult, if not impossible. Here, I examine a model of bureaucratic appointments that allows for informationally imperfect agencies. I show that when legislative assent is required, tradeoffs between ideology and either patronage or agency performance—or both—are often required to ensure legislative confirmation. The same dynamics are not present for unilateral appointments. Finally, using a dataset that incorporates the ideologies of federal program managers, the performance of federal programs, and whether program managers were patronage appointees, I conduct a series of empirical tests that support the model’s predictions.

To what extent do presidents select appointees based upon campaign experience and connections? The answer to this question has important implications for our understanding of presidential management and political leadership. This paper presents a theory explaining where presidents place different types of appointees and why, focusing on differences in ideology, competence, and non-policy patronage benefits among potential appointees. We develop a formal model and test its implications with new data on 1,307 persons appointed in the first six months of the Obama Administration. The empirical results broadly support the theory, suggesting that President Obama was more likely to place appointees selected for nonpolicy patronage reasons in agencies off his agenda, in agencies that shared his policy views, and where appointees are least able to affect agency performance. We conclude that patronage continues to play an important role in American politics with important consequences for campaigns, presidential politics, and governance.

President Obama placed his most competent appointees in agencies most important to—and most resistant to—his political agenda (LSE)

Scholars have seemingly established that constituents hold “out of step” legislators electorally accountable. Empirically, however, such claims have not been based on measures placing districts and perceptions of legislators’ preferences in the same space. We remedy this using the 2006 and 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies and Aldrich and McKelvey’s scaling procedure, finding that electoral success is roughly consistent with Downsian logic but not with the blanket statement that out of step incumbents are penalized. Voters punish out of step incumbents conditional on having a sufficiently more “in step” challenger.Effects are substantial, but so are incumbent advantages.​

Note: There is a typo in the published version that was introduced during the typesetting stage. On page 859, the published version reads \(\beta_d = \frac{Z_{\text{GOPParty, d}} + Z_{\text{DemParty, d}}}{2}\). This should instead read \(\beta_d = \frac{Z_{\text{GOPParty, d}} - Z_{\text{DemParty, d}}}{2}\).